


this time feels like progress

by circuitricardoporno



Category: Formula E RPF
Genre: Domination, Multi, Non-Sexual Kink, Other, Submission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 14:26:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18500863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/circuitricardoporno/pseuds/circuitricardoporno
Summary: “We have a deal - if I didn't beat his time, I have to do the whole simulation for Monaco.”“Oooof. Couldn't you have gone a bit slower and taken that for the team?” James exhales dramatically. “So what's he got to do? Trip up Dan Ticktum or something?”Tatiana laughs and there is nothing remotely innocent about it, some heat in her voice when she says “If I beat his time, I tie him up.”





	this time feels like progress

**Author's Note:**

> title is sort of from cry everything by kindness ft. robyn, which is the sort of fuzzy immersive noise wash this is supposed to feel like; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXoVLCuBkFM
> 
> thank to friends who cheerled this, you rotten perverts

“I was faster.”

She says it quite straightforwardly, almost conversational if there wasn't just a hint of steel to it, a kiss on the vocal throttle that could see it all rapidly hurtling into disaster.

“Mmm? So you were.” André tries to ignore that little tingle of embarrassing excitement. She can't possibly be serious, even if it is disturbingly hot to think about.

“Well? We had a deal.” she's smiling, looking somewhere between devilish and delighted and she must be joking, absolutely no doubt.

André stretches his arms behind his head, grabs the scaffold holding up the back of the catering tent and tries to work out what bit of the motion her eyes follow: the slight rise of his shirt, exposing an inch or so of stomach muscles or the flex of his wrists against the bar.

Tatiana unnerves him, almost gets a shiver if he hadn't got decades of self control, by instead staying focused on his throat as he has to arch his head back. It makes him want to swallow and also think he really shouldn't.

“I made a mistake,” he says, to pull things back. “On my lap - it would have been fast otherwise.”

Tatiana’s smile is dazzling, gracious, charismatic. The sort of thousand-watt thing that reminds him of something, some rivalry that makes him the right kind of slightly nervous. Oh, god.

She's twelve years younger than him for God's sake - JEV is bad enough but André had reconciled himself to almost being a passenger to the other drivers insistence with that one. This is. She has to be joking.

She pauses for a moment, still smiling like she's laughing at him, “I didn't make a mistake. We had a deal.”

He can't stop himself swallowing. She says it so lightly, there's absolutely no question she knows what she means and her eyes aren't laughing, something else there.

“What's all this then?” Ah, saved from horrible life choices by James yet again. André should buy him a Porsche.

“We have a deal - if I didn't beat his time, I have to do the whole simulation for Monaco.”

“Oooof. Couldn't you have gone a bit slower and taken that for the team?” James exhales dramatically. “So what's he got to do? Trip up Dan Ticktum or something?”

Tatiana laughs and there is nothing remotely innocent about it, some heat in her voice when she says “If I beat his time, I tie him up.”

James half - laughs like he was trying to work out where the joke was, then stares at André, with an expression somewhere on the spectrum of delight and horror for a long few seconds.

“Well, five seconds is five seconds. You better have brought your fluffy handcuffs mate, I don't think they sell that stuff in the souks.”

Something jerks by André's head and it makes him twitch, sees Tatiana has the end of one of the marquee guide ropes wrapped suggestively around her fist, “Is plenty of options.”

James looks as starkly blindsided as André feels, albeit less simultaneously aroused. “Jolly… good. Well, everyone have fun - safe, sane and consensual and all that.”

“Of course, of course. If he doesn't want, we don't - is no unconditional deal. But…” she trails off and André feels like they're literally talking over his head with the way he’s slumped back, sits up straight and then feels like a schoolboy which is not actually helping with anything if it turns out he has a mild embarrassment kink.

“Yeah, err.” James looks profoundly uncomfortable and André would trust him with his life but he knows how desperately Rossiter must want to tell someone, anyone, that multiple-time Le Mans winner André Lotterer has just had a GP3 driver make him blush until his ears burned pink. Fuck.

“Anyway, I go for the social media stuff now - see you at the hotel.” Tatiana’s smile is very bright and very sweet and very full of teeth. And confidence.

“Mate, you can't make bets with Latin Americans.” James is rubbing his face like he's trying to encourage his beard to grow, perhaps to fast forward time enough to get over the awkwardness. They've known each other for decades too long not to have talked about sex - sober, drunk, disasters, conquests - but uh… _proclivities_ have never really come up. At least not in the direct context of the simulator driver giving him a boner that will add an extra ten minutes to his lunch break or another underwear offenses fine.

“Feisty, you know,” James continues, too long after his original statement for André to remember what he's making small talk over. Fuck, that thing with the rope - she _surely_ doesn't know shibari? He can't suppress the shiver but does manage not to actually make any noises. Get a grip, man.

“Can I watch?” André throws a banana at James, diving at him for a wrestle.

“Absolutely fucking not. I am not doing it, anyway.” James gets revenge with a glass of water splashed in his face that leaves André spluttering for a second.

“I think you should do it, it might be fun.” He tries not to imagine when exactly JEV arrived to the conversation. “She has good arms.”

He can't help glaring at Jean-Éric for that. Losing a bet is one thing but you can't just outright perv on the development driver. “What? She does. I am not an old man like you, I can't help noticing beautiful women by only fancying James.”

And that's the crux of it really. Not that he only fancies James - André isn't even sure he'd call it fancying Rossiter at this point unless you can fancy a particular vibrator or something. They're just really _good_ at getting each other off.

But he is, undeniably, an old man. Older man, at least. And fucking Jev is OK but it's not like he'd fuck Mitch, no matter how keen he seems sometimes. And anyway he's not sure there's going to be any fucking involved, which is straightforward, so much as an intimate exposure of his most delicate psychology and he should _not_ have fucked up that corner. He can't even remember what her arms look like, just the threat in that bright white smile.

“Why don't you do it, then, monsieur kinks-a-lot?” André's hair is still dripping a little and Jev’s squirrel brain is visibly distracted watching the drops bead down his ear and neck.

“Mmm, I don't think she likes me. Not like that anyway. And it's not like anyone's surprised if I'm into bondage, it's less of an achievement, you know.” Jev pauses in peeling his tangerine, “Where are my sunglasses? Anyway, it's like knowing Lucas is into pegging. No one cares.”

Lucas is into pegging? “But you're not into bondage.”

Jev shrugs at him, “No one would care if I was.”

The implication, that people _would_ care about finding out André's deep, dark secrets and the way he can imagine being tied up and restrained and _touched_ is nothing that makes this feel better. And why the fuck are his friends encouraging him to get tied up by the sim driver anyway?

“Right.” He finds himself unexpectedly struggling struggling for a comeback, “Because you're pretty gay anyway.”

The unexpected spluttering from Rossiter ( _seriously?)_ and tut from Jev feel unnecessary. Has everyone else been to some kind of specialist briefing he hasn't?

“I don't think being tied up by women is _gay_ ” Jev says, sniffily, in the same tone he uses for being a pedant about something technical he's learnt that he doesn't think André is impressed enough by. Then somehow manages to take French disdain to a new level by theatrically pausing to chew a segment of tangerine slowly before speaking with his mouth full anyway, “unless you are a woman also.”

“Yeah, they have that on the internet” James manages. As though he's the only one to ever whack it to Kink previews.

“Great well, I'm glad we've had this chat? But you know she's in GP3.” André has won _Le Mans,_ is what he keeps thinking. That's like, old dude achievement right there.

“F2, no?” Jev is rooting through the fruit bowl again, says it as though that's the difference between Spain and France not high school and university and neither is even a little bit, remotely OK.

“I've won Le Mans.” He can't stop it coming out, “ _Three times_.”

“So?” Jev waves a dismissive hand in his direction before André can point out that’s three entire times more than anyone else here. He seems to remember Jean-Eric thinking it was more of a thing when he was crying in a dingy railway station bar toilet and refusing to come out until someone lodged an appeal against his disqualification. “You’re not going to do it so… who cares. It’s just a thing you’re going to be in a mood about for three days and then forget.”

 _Unlike getting disqualified from Le Mans,_ André can’t help thinking, even if he isn’t quite unkind enough to say it, despite all the ribbing having left his skin feeling prickly and ill-settled. He can’t think of anything to say so just makes a sort of huffing, grunting noise and regrets the fact he’s slightly damp, the air getting chilly again after sundown.

“See? A mood. Where are we eating tonight, I am bored by fruit.” Jev flicks an orange pip at him, which lands as firmly into his hair as the whole thing embeds in his brain, uncomfortable and sticky.

\-------

He gets a precious, wonderful hour of lying on his stomach, mostly naked, editing photos on his laptop. The pleasure of hotel-ironed sheets against sensitive skin has yet to wear out even after so many decades and the plummeting temperatures in the desert outside make lying opposite the floor-to-ceiling window in nothing but his underwear even more satisfying.

André ignores three texts from Jev that are almost certainly an escalating series of dick pics. He’s faintly pissed off to be cut off from the actual sex bit but still having to put up with all the other aspects of Jev, like moping if he gets left alone for 10 minutes and stealing André’s socks.

Marrakech had been when he’d first properly just given in to letting Jean-Eric drag him into things. When he’d admitted he couldn’t be here while being embarrassed about either the series or the extent to which he’d just roll over like a puppy owner for Jev and give him whatever he needed or wanted. It had seemed wild and a little wicked, at the time - incense smoke curling through his fingers as he pretended to still be only toying with the idea of kissing Jean-Eric. That he held some of the cards.

Anyway, then there’d been Santiago and a championship and a switch of all sorts on all kinds of parts of his life and he was beginning to feel a little misused. Which wasn’t quite fair - he had actually needed a job and Jev had insisted he got it, off only the flimsiest friendship beforehand and what seemed like an unshakeable faith in André but there is only so much gratitude a man can have before it risks turning resentful.

At least his pictures are good. Marrakech is good for that, it feels like a place for him - a thousand miles literally and aesthetically from Gordes, from the calm control of his own environment. Walking the souks is like being plunged into something just on the edge of sensory overload, if there weren't always things to hold your attention - visual threads to follow like footsteps through tunnels and widening and narrowing streets too morphic to be described by flat cartography.

He’s not stupid enough to think he _isn’t_ falling for the seduction of camouflage, the sweet surrender of disappearance all too blunt a metaphor for wanting to express jealous, crotchety things he doesn’t like himself for feeling.

And the dangled carrot of an entirely other form of surrender is looming in his vision like the lure it is. His brain feels tight like the skin of a full fuel cell and to have that burned off, charged away, is a job that needs a driver - he’s just a passenger in his own machinery right now.

She can’t be serious. And if she is, she can’t possibly know what she’d be letting herself in for, what André _needs._ He can’t believe she’d know enough to trust her and the safe and sane goes both ways.

 _But then why would she offer?_ The impish thought can’t be suppressed. He doesn’t know, can’t come up with anything other than a youthful stupidity she very obviously doesn’t have and fuck if he doesn’t halfway think he maybe fucked up that corner to, somewhere in the absolute deepest pit of his brain, test this limit. It was a joke, an unsubstantial thing without solidity, a barrier so gossamer he couldn’t take it seriously enough not to run at it full-pelt.

He doesn’t want to fuck. He’s got some complicated, weird arousal-excitement about the idea of her tying him up but he also has that about, say, the insane, witchy hours of Le Mans. The lonely time between 3 and 5am when things seem to get quiet and fold in and out all at once, the engine noises stretched wild and whippy on air that’s been drawn expansively upward to the stars, your line of vision huge and vague between the headlights and the distance. Objects in the rear-view mirror may only seem real when they're heart-stoppingly close.

Things begin to get floaty, unreal. It’s not the tiredness, which drags more as the sun comes up and the physical demands of heat start fighting for dominance with the mental. It’s the realisation, a little like when he was strapped in for his very first kart races, that there’s no going back from this point. The moment on the grid when all the mechanics leave and you’re alone in this, a crackly radio your only link and you have to _trust_ \- yourself, the machine, the fear/flight/lust all competing for adrenal supply.

He’s looked for it his whole career, that sensation of facing up to something incomprehensible and the sweetness of doing it, mastering it, edging his own limits to the very point of oblivion. The longing goes straight to his crotch, sure but with equal bolts to his heart and head, something more cerebral and necessary than the sleazy excitement of a fetish. He likes lingerie, likes the pure visual of Jev stretched louche and lazy, a wet shadow on pale silk the only sign of urgency that’s in the Frenchman’s eyes.

But it doesn’t take him anywhere, any more than looking at a photo essay stirs wanderlust; it can’t transport him.

Is it really fair or realistic to expect Tatiana to help him there, though? And If she did, can André trust her to choose the destination?

He’s _not_ doing it. He can find a different way to sort his head out.

\------

With some inevitability, he does it.

It’s not as easy as that - because nothing, especially this, is. First there has to be the dinner, which is perfectly pleasant even as he feels a bit far-away, listening to the call to prayer more than he is drinking the (excellent) _syrah du Maroc,_ inhaling the steam from his tagine for longer than he needs to before eating it.

He can feel an edge of melancholy seeping into himself, something bleak starting to gnaw at the edges of his emotional state. He could do without a night on his own, is almost tempted by the models or the easy, half-tragic chance to ask James to join him. Except he looks to have got the keycard for Jev and Lorene’s room, which is a burn a little too far for André and he knows he’ll sound like a petulant child if he says anything, get smoke blown into his face as Jean-Eric laughs warmly that he thought André had a date with Tatiana.

It shouldn’t be a last resort. That’s not how to go about it. And he can’t ask her for it - god. Why has he allowed himself to be lowered so far down this mental well, daylight long disappeared and unable to come up without drawing water. Or drowning.

Feeling himself fill up with the resentment and jealousy and wants is the fear, submerging in his own feelings that are barely even real, certainly not reasonable. It comes at him in waves that the sadness tugs harder and harder to pull him under, like pebbles around his feet on a beach, skidding and tumbling away _so easily._

Tatiana has noticed he isn’t talking much. “You’ve won Le Mans,” she pauses with a forkful of food close to a mouth he finds it difficult to look away from, like she might eat him too, “three times.”

He really ought to be able to do more than nod mutely, clearing his throat and trying to come up with ways in which it’s impossible she eavesdropped on them earlier.

“Yep,” he manages eventually, feeling like he maybe ought to lose one of the victories for lameness alone.

“Did you take photos, during the race?” She scrunches her nose up for a moment “Races? Ugh, English.”

That is a sentiment he can get behind, “It’s awful. Races - and no, kind of? Like, I can’t take a vest and go out on track between stints, you know.”

“Would you want to, after-” she sort of gestures with her fork at what André gathers is ‘everything’ and ‘Formula E’ and ‘racing’ in general.

“Mmn, I guess.” He doesn’t like to think about an _after_ , that topic comes up too much with James and Jenson. He’s still in the _now_ or even the _before._

She’s studying him and it occurs to André that she was asking about his photos as a way to get him to talk about something. Trust goes both ways, “I like shooting at night, I might go to the Nordschliefe.”

“Is it good to shoot at? I heard it snows.” He laughs because god, yes. Just a bit.

“And hails. That’s less of a problem than the rain, though.” She cocks an eyebrow, while chewing, telling him to carry on, “It’s in a forest, the rain just turns everything slimy-dank so it’s leaves and half-buried tree roots slipping out of wads of loam and shit, your boots get three times wider in one hundred metres.”

“How poetic.” She’s laughing at him but kindly, interestedly. It would be flirtatious if it was Jev, always pushing for something but Tatiana is reserved and contained, just asking him to tell her something worth hearing.

“It’s a good race - you have to be stupid to enter and insane to win.” Drivers are dumb as rocks and she surely knows, “The fans are like a zoo, you know… like a Mad Max film. Just beer-soaked and coming out of the greenery half-naked with _Timo spritzt auf meine Titten_ in bodypaint or shit or something on some 28-stone dude who runs an insurance firm.”

He’s pretty sure she doesn’t speak German or might have toned that down, even though there’s no way she’s spent this long in racing without hearing things way worse. And he has no idea what she gets up to in her spare time, of course and he’d defend any woman’s right to do whatever she wanted with her tits.

Trust Jev, however, to get involved at this point “Who’s coming on whose tits?”

André can’t stop it before its out of his mouth, “Rossiter on yours, I thought.”

It’s too vicious, he doesn’t even mean it, he just. Wanted to say it anyway.

Jev pouts, ‘You are in a mood, it’s very boring,” he turns to Tatiana, “is he being boring?”

Tatiana shakes her head and reaches for the wine, taking her time topping up her and André’s glasses and ignoring Jev’s pointed look. There’s a gust of air as she holds her glass up to the light for a second, watching the ruby swirl as heat and something spicy-sweet waft out of the kitchen, leaving Jev waiting for her to place it back on the table to sort himself out.

Something clicks at the back of André’s mind. It’s almost like an altitude-pop in his ears, like the noise has suddenly turned up in the room, like he’s suddenly much more _there._

“I’m always more of a Schneider fan.” It takes him a moment to thread back to what she means, his own shitty joke lost to him in the tumble of losing control at Jev and the way Tatiana just… refused to let it.

He feels a little more stable, “He’s a great driver.”

André almost stops to take a steadying breath, looking down into the remains of his chicken to wonder if this is enough, if he doesn’t need to go staring over a precipice. But his breathing’s already even, the food just feels warm and good in his mouth, nourishing and juicy as the wine is rich and laden with heat from the _terroir._

“Have you ever been to Le Mans?” For a second, out of the corner of André’s eye, Jev looks like he’s going to interrupt - then has one of his moments of awareness, turns back to breathy flirting with Lorene. It shouldn’t wind André up, Jev’s insistent company has kept his head together far more times than it’s driving him to prickly irritation.

“No,” she sounds as rueful as the confession merits, “Maybe this year - I haven’t always been in Europe.”

André wouldn’t admit to having googled her racing record recently enough to know perfectly well she has been for several years. He’s too obsessive to pretend to louchely not know his own schedule but he definitely doesn’t know anyone else’s and everyone has stuff in their lives, the messy tangles outside the safe sterility of a paddock, a place sacrosanct to the job. Even he does, despite the conscious sparcity of his life.

“You should, it’s… ah, you know, it’s something else. Everything they say it is and then some.” He’s pissed off about Saturday’s race, he realises. Pissed off and tired and he’s _definitely_ not going to fucking Ushuaïa.

“Perhaps,” she says it with a slight dare, like she has some plan he knows nothing about and maybe never will. She’d be good in Le Mans - or at least, capable; anyone who’s been alone in racing knows both how to endure it and how to slot in.

Capable. He definitely thinks that about her.

When taxis are called, they share one back to the hotel while Lorene and Jev drag an only-slightly-poleaxed-looking James off to fuck-knows-what Moët party. Tatiana looks out the window, lights on the dual carriageway playing across her face, as a slightly sozzled PR tries to tell him what time his flight is tomorrow.

He thinks this is it, that he’ll just edit photos for a few more hours and fall into a comfortable-if-not-totally-satisfied sleep later and things will be more or less normal in the morning. But she stops him, just as they’re heading into the hotel, touches his wrist lightly but in a way he can’t possibly misunderstand, “If you want to.”

He really fucking does.

There’s a pause, except not really - like that nonexistent space between lights out and on the throttle, time that doesn’t perceptibly exist apart from as instinct and motion. “Yes.”

She nods, no theatrics and says something to her sister in Spanish that he doesn’t listen in on. Paula disappears towards the bar with a laugh, leaving them heading quietly to the lifts alone.

There’s no panic, exactly but a bit of anticipatory jangling - a sense of both knowing and not knowing what’s coming. He wants something sudden, almost violent but that’s wrong and he’s absolutely certain not what he’s going to get - the adrenaline leaps ahead of his brain but that’s the point of someone else doing it.

It’s exhausting, being in control of your own body and he needs to not be, just for a little while.

André’s sure Tatiana understands - and he doesn’t want to know why or how or very specifically who. Maybe just a natural interest in _50 Shades of Grey_ or better self awareness about the curious relationship to one’s trainer than he had at her age.

Her room is quiet, at the corner of the hotel away from the road, looking out onto brownfield scrubland that will presumably one day be houses or something, construction just visible at the edges of the distance before it bleeds into the enveloping Sahara. Standing against the window, he can look at her reflection rather than her and the night washes away all his greys and her youth, turning them into ageless beings with the depth of the landscape.

He hadn’t taken a coat to dinner and the walk from cab to lobby, then down chilly corridors, has left his skin pimpling against that sharp, empty desert air - like it’s trying to pull back into him to resist the touch of the void.

Fortunately Tatiana’s hands are warm. “Clothes on or off?”

He can’t avoid the blush - god, he’s never actually… while dressed. But that was always different, he’s not here to get off. “Uhm.”

She’s not-exactly-scrutinising him - or at least there’s nothing interrogatory about it, more just observation. “You like the feel of the rope?”

God, does she actually know shibari? He spends a moment thinking about it before nodding.

“No jeans then, do you have a t-shirt?” Yes, soft. Not the buttons of his going-out-aged-over-35 shirt, that isn’t what he wants to feel - but he doesn’t actually have a shirt.

She disappears from next to him at the window, some rustling behind him making him turn away from the coldness of the desert to the warm, sandstone-toned interior of her softly lit room. She spools a long, satin-sheened rope onto the pristine, tucked sheets of the bed - silk maybe, even - and he tries to calm down while she roots through a bag, only very nearly misses catching the black shape she throws at him.

“It’s Jev’s but I don’t think he’s worn it,” she says it apologetically and, looking down at the black-on-black print of his teammate’s logo on the t-shirt, André has to agree. “Just turn it inside out. At least it would annoy him.”

That’s an oddly comforting thought. He’s ok with this, it’s about as normal as an impromptu bondage session in the sim driver’s hotel room is likely to get - as though he was likely to forget Jev during this, anyway.

She busies herself with the rope, neither looking bored nor at him while he undresses. His shoes feel clumpy, undone on her floor and draping his too-expensive jeans over the chair feels both ostentatious and not tidy enough to be polite. He’d forgotten he was wearing y-fronts instead of boxers, which is probably for the best but leaves him very weirdly conscious of his inner thighs, the band feeling heavy against the join of his leg.

And he needs to take off his shirt. Which feels monumentally embarrassing for some reason even though he knows she literally stood there while he stripped off in the briefing yesterday.

 _You might enjoy being embarrassed,_ his mind helpfully prompts. Ok, fine - he can learn new things about himself via the hint of rouge that trails up his chest and neck, blossoms lower as he undoes the buttons, spends too long smoothing down the sleeves as he hangs it over the chair and pulls his teammate’s inside-out merch over his head. If he wanted a heavy-handed metaphor, there it is.

She’s watching him when he emerges from the dark fabric, feeling his hair disarray in a way he’s not really comfortable with but doesn’t want to be prissy enough to fuck with. There’s something definitely wicked in her expression, something heated and with more than a touch of desire, which is at least reassuring when he’s just exposed pretty much his entire body to her.

Tatiana gives him a moment to breathe, maybe giving herself a moment too - André knows the mental process is as mutual as fucking. “Your hands behind you or in front of you?”

There’s an awkwardness to the way she phrases it that he finds oddly reassuring, like a spell. He doesn’t want to speak, just holds out his hands, fists down, in front of his waist and waits - if she knows what she’s doing, he’ll know now.

She doesn’t blink, if he was expecting her to back out - instead moves across, the dark dress she’s wearing shushing against the bed as she brushes past it, rope looped in her hand. The only pause is as she’s about to touch him, a glance of permission to let him nod minutely before she grips his wrists with one surprisingly strong hand and bends them back to his chest.

She’s shorter than him - even in the heels he’s pretty sure she still has on - to such a degree that she almost has to reach above her head to loop the doubled-up rope around his wrists. It’s cool and smooth against his skin, fascinated by the coils as they weave once, twice around, then twist together and slide between his hands, a gentle pressure at the pulse point before she ties them off, facing her and away from his teeth.

André swallows, more heavily than he was expecting - the yellow light from the lamps gleams off the shiny of the silk almost mesmerising, his skin looks rough with texture beneath it. He should have taken off his watch.

“Ok?” There’s a low tone in her voice, something husky. The rope doesn’t only tie him.

“Yeah.” He is - ok, that is. He feels strangely normal, breathing even, bar a little edge-of-hypnosis at watching her fingers work, threading the trailing lengths of rope between his arms like a weaver, each brush clever and precise. He doesn’t follow the lines - more like watching a candle flame, most of the knots hidden from his vision by his own forearms.

She stops at his elbows, “You will have to kneel down for me to do the shoulders.”

Ah yes, the height difference. He’d sort of imagined she just had some magic way to overcome that, the way she seems to every other barrier in her way.

He does it without thinking that his hands are tied - with ropes she’s still holding - and sort of loses his balance on the way down, flails for a moment until he feels her hand in his hair. It’s not expected, exactly - although he knew she was going to have to touch him _somewhere_ along the way - and he has a few seconds of being destabilised in more way than one before he relaxes into it, fingers scritching in the short hair behind his right ear.

He closes his eyes because this is about sensation, she can’t take him somewhere if he’s determined to stay in the room. André feels rather than sees her move behind him, the air brushing against his leg hair where her skirt swishes, inches away from him. When her hands go back to the ropes, it’s firmly and at his shoulders, the knuckles of one hand dragging silk over each side of his neck and down the shoulder blades, twisting to tie beneath them before looping in front of him again in a dance over his ribs that leaves him glad he went for the t-shirt, the rub of silk on sensitive nipples a step too far for what he wants.

Five loops and he’s bound - no amount of time in the gym could move his arms from where they’re neatly tucked to his sides, tied and trussed like a captive bird. He feels her move the ropes, tying them off behind his waist and keeping one hand there, steady against the knot while she rubs the base of his skull, the soft skin below his jaw, with the thumb and forefinger of the other.

It’s quiet and comfortable, with his eyes closed he could almost fall asleep and has definitely forgotten that he’s being tied up by the sim driver while wearing his fucking _teammate’s_ personalised merch. Or not, of course, since that seems to be what comes to mind as soon as he empties it.

“Shhhh,” she squeezes a delicate spot, some strain or other he didn’t even know he had and the pain gives him something to concentrate on. Athlete’s bodies hurt, all the time and almost non-specifically, the dull ache of pushing but there are knots within that that can be shifted, that give way to a better function. His physio is normally thorough enough but he can hardly call Helmut up and say he’s been clenching his jaw during a drinks reception because his best friend is getting fucked by his teammate’s girlfriend tonight and it winds him up almost uncontrollably.

Tatiana, he suspects, understands that. Or at least is clearly clever enough to work out where he’s hurting, if not why.

There’s a pressure from the hand at his waist, pushing him slightly forward as her other hand gently pulls his shoulder back, elongating his spine in an arch. She’s strong, more than able to support his weight with just a few points of contact and he’s grateful not to feel crowded, acutely aware she’s watching his reaction, reading him with the voracity of a thriller.

She slides her hand from his shoulder, back to the base of his neck and up, tilting his head back with firm fingers against his scalp, rubbing just enough to not feel vicelike, her pulse even and slow where he can feel it against his own skull.

It would be just a massage, just indulgent relaxation, if he didn’t know perfectly well what was coming - and was still wrongfooted by it, adrenaline spiking in just the right way as his eyes fly open. She’s suddenly stood, yanking him up by the rope at his waist and letting him stumble to a clumsy stand, hand still on his neck.

It’s good that it’s there, stabilising even as the delicious, tingling energy of it flows through him. It’s nice to be tied up, yes but it’s much nicer to be _controlled._ He wanted that loss of agency, wanted something more vicious than a soft bedtime routine and a few, quickly faded red marks.

Tatiana waits until he’s standing firmly before giving him a gentle shove forward, which he resists - but knows it’s a question. “Ok?”

“Very ok.” He… Jev can never see him like this but he also doesn’t want to think about Jev right now, he wants to get pushed down onto the bed and have his ankles tied and then maybe she could play a little rough with him. He’s a big boy, he can take it.

André can sense the smile behind him - it’s the one with all the teeth that haunted him earlier. She waits just long enough he almost isn’t expecting it when she halfway picks him up bodily by the ropes looped behind him - unable to move his arms, he's off-balance and can't stop himself tumbling, feet feeling like a cartoon whirl beneath him as he tries to fall rather than _fall over_ as she throws more than pushes him forwards.

His eyes are closed before he hits the sandy-gold sheets, cool and clean and fresh smelling against his face. Tatiana is as mercilessly fast now as she is on track, bending up his legs to truss his feet in the same loops as his wrists. She pauses, one hand on the top of his leg, fingers splayed over skin and the back of his underwear until he nods, knowing what’s coming.

The friction between his thighs is too much - or too little, silky rope flowing as smoothly as a tongue as double loops curl around his legs, until Tatiana’s hand has to pass under his stomach and he naiively hopes he doesn’t have a boner (he does) because he doesn’t want her to think that’s the point of this.

If she notices, it neither slows her speed nor changes what she’s doing, until his trussed feet are drawn back up almost to his ass and his stomach is stretched between points of binding, rubbing taut against rope and the sheets. He could move maybe millimetres, if he really wanted to and he feels like elegantly arrayed artwork, like the sensation where his skin meets the sheets, t-shirt ridden up, is the flash of gold off a plinth statue. He can’t stop the moan.

He hears her intake a breath and although he doesn’t want to open his eyes, a hotel room’s interior much too mundanely anonymous for the sensations he’s having, he knows she’s smiling in that devourer’s way. The tug tighter, jerking his body gently, confirms it - oh _god._

André isn’t going to come - he doesn’t even feel aroused in any genuinely sexual way, although Tatiana’s thigh resting against his is a different thought for another time, he’s just at that perfect limit, where any further push could send him into sweet pain and he _wants_ it. Wants to wake up tomorrow as burnt and limbless as a bootcamp.

She pushes and he doesn’t resist the sound - the pain’s almost abstract, a contortionist’s warm-up stretch and he knows she isn’t _hurting_ him per se, just controlling him to a place a little beyond the strictly comfortable, which is exactly where he wants to be after a weekend of strange, off-kilter annoyances.

He feels Tatiana’s hand on his face, fingers steering-wheel rough where she traces over the curve of his eyebrow, his cheekbone, checking he’s with her. “More?”

He nods, swallowing a little thickly as the more white-hot feeling subsides and the sharper burn of the ropes fills the space. Something’s in front of his mouth - and he realises it must be some item of her clothes, something cotton and soft. She has a point; they’re in a hotel with walls he knows from the experience of being next to Abt last year are not thick enough for pushing a grown man’s limits.

It’s better, biting down on the t-shirt or whatever, knowing he isn’t going to fully embarrass himself as she forces his spine to arch in almost an imitation of an earth-shattering orgasm, the ropes bite into his ankles and thighs and his forearms are crushed beneath him and all he can think about is the sensation. He’s breathing harshly through his nose, mouth full of barely-stifled sounds that feel ripped out of him. It’s something deep and buried that when she digs her blunt nails into the soft skin of his inner thigh, he can’t stop coming howling out.

It’s not an orgasm, it’s like an exorcism of something where he forgets his own name for a few primal, delirious seconds.

When he comes panting back, the cotton’s being tugged out of his mouth - rope is moving like snakes over his skin as he’s swiftly untied, as skillfully as he was restrained but with what feels like impossible speed as he sinks into the duvet. _Fuck._

She’s sitting near him, or maybe kneeling - somewhere close by on the bed, just behind him, one hand very gently rubbing the sweaty skin between his shoulder blades through Jev’s shirt. It’s a testament to the whole thing that that doesn’t even bother him, too preoccupied with aches shooting through him like aftershocks

“You are good at this.” André’s not sure what he was expecting but it wasn’t quite that, although it’s definitely what he wants to hear.

He manages a “Fuck’n hell, you too.” Everything burns and it’s so good, everywhere he’s sprawled against the bed is good, Tatiana’s hand is good. Not feeling like he’s got a ball of bad energy in the pit of his stomach that he’s going to vomit out in bile-spiked snipes of moodiness is just _unbelievable._

“It was because of 50 Shades, yes,” she says, unasked and a genuine note of embarrassment in her voice that makes him roll over to see the blush, her eyes averted to the ceiling until she gets it under control. “But you know, lots of people get into racing because of films.”

He nods, when she looks down at him again, smiling in a more genuine, slightly sheepish way that feels more intimate than when she had her hand next to his balls a few minutes earlier. “Well, thanks.”

She smiles again, strokes his cheek. “No problem.”

\------

James looks like he’s on day three of a particularly exhaustive stag do, blearily standing in Menara airport in a slight crouch as though he’s afraid of his own headache. It’s extremely amusing.

“Good evening, hmm?”

“God… good. Yeah.” André takes pity and goes to get them coffees, which James manages to sip without burping.

Rossiter looks dazed in a way that says he’s had less than half an hour of drunk sleep in a taxi, after presumably room service champagne seemed like a good post-coital strategy. Jev can be highly persuasive, even if Carl hadn’t come to watch.

“Where were you, anyway?” James is clearly in the ‘piecing things back together’ stage.

“I went to bed.” It’s not wholly untrue, even if he took a short detour before getting there.

“Oh, yeah. That was a good plan.” James’ stubble looks somewhere past the comfortably scruffy phase and he clearly needs some paracetamol and a lie down.

If anyone remembers anything about his bet with Tatiana, it obviously isn’t going to be interrogated right now. Jev and Lorene are even later to the gate and look even worse, Jev having pulled his beanie down until it nearly meets his sunglasses as though that will in any way protect him.

It isn’t until they’re landing, he and James peeling off for the Nice flight while Jev and Lorene stumble towards Paris, that it gets mentioned.

“Hey, where’s Tatiana?” James pushes his sunglasses up his head as though he’ll suddenly acquire better vision, rather than a presumably fairly blinding migraine. “You didn’t scare her off with your kinks did you?”

“Hmm? No, she’s gone to Tangiers.” James blinks at him, “It’s on the coast.”

“Right, yeah. Yeah, good choice.”

In the end, they’re all adults.

 


End file.
